The old man strove to light his pipe, his bony hands trembling as with palsy. I steadied the bowl and held a lighted match to it. “Thank you, Grandson,” he said, in a voice gone thin and quavering on a sudden. For some time he sat studying the ground through the slowly emitted smoke. Then, handing the pipe to me, he continued. His voice had lost its former tone of harsh immediacy and seemed weary with its burden of dead days remembered. “There was a dog--a soldier-chief’s dog. He was tall and thin and long-legged, and he was crying and running towards the soldiers’ town. Somebody shouted: ‘Let him go and tell the other dogs back there!’ But many bow-thongs twanged, and he went down rolling in a cloud of feathers. “A storm was coming on. The sun was covered, and the wind came very strong and very cold. “I remember when the warriors came back to the village. The night was cold and dark and the wind was howling. There were many voices shouting louder than the wind out there, and the sound of many hoofs. When I ’woke, I thought the soldiers had come to kill us all when our warriors were away, and I was afraid. But my mother said: ‘It is our people, and they have killed many enemies. Do you not hear them singing?’ She stirred the fire and fed it, so that it would be bright and warm for my father. Then she went out into the dark full of shouting and singing and the wind; and I listened and was afraid again, for I could hear women’s high voices mourning. “But my father was not dead. There was one at his head and one at his feet when they brought him in and laid him on a robe beside the fire. His face looked queer when he smiled at me, and it was not the war paint. He was almost somebody else. His hands and feet were frozen and there was an arrow deep in his hip--a Cheyenne arrow. When they cut it out, he grunted but he did not cry. He shivered and shivered by the hot fire until a _wichasha wakon_ came and made sacred medicine. Then it was morning and my mother was still sitting there beside my father, and he was sleeping. “There was mourning in many of the lodges--high, sharp voices of the women crying for those who died in the battle and the wounded who died coming home. _Oosni! Lela oosni!_ It was cold, very cold.” For some time the old man sat with his eyes closed and his chin on his chest. At length he said, as though muttering to himself: “They all died, a hundred soldiers died in the country that was ours. But the forked-tongued ones who sent them did not die. I think they are living yet.” III _The New Medicine Power_ “We have lost Tashina somewhere, Grandfather,” I said. The remark, dropped into a long-sustained silence, fell like a pebble upon empty air. The old man’s eyes remained closed and the sharply cut features expressed nothing but age. At length his face came alive with a slowly spreading smile, and he looked at me with gentle, grandfatherly eyes.